Man who killed three gets three life terms

NEWPORT NEWS — A man who once faced the possibility of a death penalty prosecution in the slayings of three men in two states was sentenced Tuesday to three life prison terms.

Phillip Michael Bryant, 26, originally from Brooklyn, N.Y., pleaded guilty in federal court to three counts of murder in aid of racketeering.

That included two drug-related slayings at the Lincoln Park housing development in Hampton: The November 2009 killing of 24-year-old Sean McCracken and the March 2010 murder of 24-year old Johnny Avery.

In McCracken's slaying, Bryant and another man attempted to hack up the body with an ax, and ended up stuffing into a trunk and throwing it into a trash container at Lincoln Park.

The list of killings also included an earlier slaying of an off-duty New York State Corrections Officer, Jeremy Kane, who was shot and killed outside a Brooklyn beauty salon in June 2009.

In a plea agreement reached in January, the U.S. attorney's office agreed to take the death penalty and several related charges off the table in return for Bryant's guilty plea. Prosecutors in New York also agreed to let Virginia handle the Kane prosecution.

On Tuesday, Senior U.S. District Judge Robert G. Doumar sentenced Bryant to three life sentences, the only other sentence allowed for the crime.

"Phillip Bryant poisoned the Lincoln Park Towers community with the crack he dealt," U.S. Attorney Neil H. MacBride, the district's top prosecutor, said in a prepared statement. "In protecting his drug 'turf,' Bryant's violence caused the death of multiple Hampton residents and left a shaken community in his wake."

At January's plea hearing, one of Bryant's lawyers, Lawrence H. Woodward Jr., said he thought a death penalty prosecution was "a very real risk" for Bryant. "Three murders in two different jurisdictions, and some of them rather brutal, so I certainly factored that in to my recommendations" on whether to advise Bryant to plead, Woodward said.

According to a statement of facts agreed to as part of the guilty plea, Bryant killed Kane, the corrections officer, as retribution for Kane having charged the brother of one of Bryant's gang associates for robbing the officer of a gold necklace.

Bryant fled to Hampton and began selling drugs at Lincoln Park, off LaSalle Avenue.

By late 2009, Bryant was mad at McCracken, 24, another New York transplant, for apparently dealing drugs outside of the Lincoln Park complex. Bryant feared that McCracken would blow their cover, or might have become a police informant.

On Nov. 1, 2009, according to the statement of facts, Bryant shot and killed McCracken, The next day, Bryant and another man drove to the Hampton Walmart and bought a hand ax, bags and bleach.

But using the ax on the body proved difficult. So they stuffed McCracken's body into a steamer trunk and threw it into the trash container. A couple days later, a truck took the trash container's contents to a Hampton landfill.

Five months later, the police and the FBI conducted an exhaustive 31-day search of the landfill, though McCracken's remains were never recovered.

Then, on March 19, 2010, Bryant killed Avery III, 24, in what the statement of facts said was a territorial dispute with Avery and his cousin over drug dealing.

Avery's mother, Laura Avery, said she originally wanted a death-penalty prosecution, but was talked out of it by others. "A life sentence is better because he has to think about what he has done," she said at the January hearing.